Thursday 25 February 2010

What we can lean from what we have forgot

The great tragedy of our era will not be ecological, but ethnographical

''...Biologist suggest that perhaps 20 percent of mammals , 11 percent of birds, and 5 percent of fish are threatened, and the botanist anticipate the loss of 10 percent of floristic diversity, linguist and anthropologist today bear witness the imminent disappearance of half the extant languages of the world.'' '' Of the 7000 languages spoken today, fully half...will disappear within our lifetime.''
-Wade Davis. The Wayfinders, Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world

The Ethnosphere, humanity's greatest legacy is in extintion danger. With the disappearence of the half of our own diversity we will loss also the half of our history, of our spirituality, and the half of our knowledge on wich we can stand upond to face the challenges of the future. Challenges like the climate change and the lost of biodiversity, because when these voices fade out it will fade away too the cultures wich have develop and conserve the most extensive knowledge about how to live in a true and simbiotic relation with nature.

the next video it's a sample of a lecture given by Wade Davis, for the complete lecture clickHERE

Monday 22 February 2010

Artificial foot recycles energy ...as a silicon gun!!




Probably the engineers from the University of Michigan weren't thinking about this when they came with the idea of storage energy through the same kind of mechanical device that makes the silicon gun works (looj at the hhel clutch in the upper picture), but the design analogy it's perfect. This hight-tech electromechanical prosthetic feet works (in the mechanical part) with the same basic principle that a silicon gun, a clever solution for a very complex problem and a really good sample of analogous thinking in the design process.
for the complete article with all the explanation follow this
for a video of the device working folow this
and for the paper who explain... everything follow this

Tuesday 2 February 2010

Joshua Prince Ramus

Everyone that has work in theater know the face of the building administrator when you tell him that you need to put some screw in his floor or do anything that may be perceibe not quite as a damage, but a modification.
Well there is an Architect that includes that face in the design process of a new theather house in Dallas. This guy, against the idea of architecture based on self expression, take the function of the building and put it in the center of the process, together with the notion of ''architectural manifestations'' should follow the position taked by owner, the user and the designer of the building at the beggining of the design process. That is a quite interesting approach (in times were the magic pen of ''starchitects'' fly full of petrodollars) that leads to a very funtional, responsive and striking architecture.